Recruitment for smaller / mid-size hedge funds

Perhaps you could use Capital IQ to find this listing in NYC... if you do, would you PM me because I'd love to see this list of sub $1B HF in NYC as well.

Interested to see how this pans out as I've been thinking of looking at a more niche boutique firm myself.

@Kenny:

That thread is super helpful. Thanks for pointing it out. There are so many damned headhunters out there, it's remarkable. Tough to get traction with them, but they can certainly be helpful.

I've also given thought to sending messages on LinkedIn, but have always figured it'd just be annoying. That said, I don't see how it hurts. Thanks for the tips.

I made a move to a small L/S fund about 3.5 years ago. I tried recruiters, but found that angle to be worthless (I think they are totally unhelpful unless you have at least 5 years of experience or an amazing background). I ended up applying for jobs through efinancial careers, GloCap (useless) and the CFA Institute job line. I eventually landed my job through CFAI, and it is the only one of the 3 I would recommend. You don't have to be a candidate in the program to use the job line, but you would need to pay -- pretty cheap though, I think it's like $100 for 3 months or something like that. Not every job requires being a CFA candidate or having passed any levels, so it's not as much of a long shot as it might seem. I had just taken level 3 at the time and got several interviews out of it.

Now that I am on the other side of the table and did some recruiting over the last year or so, I've used recruiters (mostly useless and very expensive), Bloomberg jobs, and CFAI. I used a few other sites as well. If you use job boards, my best advice would be to review them DAILY. I posted a job a while back and got over 400 resumes in the first 12 hours. I know one of the reasons I got my current job is becuase I was among the first to reply (I literally saw the posting go up in real time). If you wait even a few days to reply, you might get buried. The guy we hired was also a first mover in responding.

The problem with small funds is that they are usually extremely hard to locate (we don't even have a website and we sit in an unmarked office, literally) and often do not formally annouce their intention to hire. We have at times randomly showed up at job fairs from good schools and tried to recruit that way. When we recruited, I spoke to the recruitment offices for the MBA programs at Wharton, Harvard and Stanford, and they all told me they wished they had more funds like ours recruiting on their campuses, so even that is not a sure deal.

So all of that said, I think it's just straight up a tough nut to crack to get into any good fund, large or small, and the best thing you could do to start with is to develop the attitude that you are going to make it no matter what and keep trying -- it might take MONTHS of really hard work to find the right fit.